Browse by Label: LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)

Artist:	A GUY CALLED GERALD
Title:	Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions Vol. 1
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	AGCG 001EP

This is part 1 in a 4-part series of limited edition 12"s from Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions (LI 017CD). These tracks reveal A Guy Called Gerald's vision for techno in its third decade of existence. After so many years of digital anything-goes, you might have forgotten the kind of sounds that are possible with "old" machines. These tracks exemplify the warmth of house and techno, recapturing the ghosts of the past by shrouding them in new, simple garments.

Artist:	A GUY CALLED GERALD
Title:	Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions Vol. 2
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	AGCG 002EP

This is part 2 in a 4-part series of limited edition 12"s from Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions (LI 017CD). A Guy Called Gerald has spent the last couple of years flitting through shadows, turning up on labels like Perlon, Beatstreet and Sender like a peripatetic prophet of the Berlin underground, seeding the scene with cryptic singles that return to the past to suggest alternate futures. The three tracks included here are "Nuvo Alfa," "Flutter" and "Wow Yheah."

Artist:	DAEDELUS
Title:	Meanwhile...
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	LP
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	LI 001LP

2010 repress, 2004 release. LP version. Born Alfred Weisberg-Roberts in Santa Monica, CA, producer/instrumentalist Daedelus wanted to be an inventor from an early age, a sentiment that led to him choosing an artistic moniker (in Greek mythology, Daedalus was known as an inventor, although Weisberg-Roberts also cites the character Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- as well as the ship in the Japanese cartoon Robotech -- as equally valid reasons for his selection) when he began releasing his own work. Despite the fact that he was formally trained on double bass and bass clarinet, had studied jazz at USC, and could play additional instruments such as the guitar and accordion, Daedelus chose to go the electronic route, often incorporating samples from the '30s and '40s into his IDM and left-field hip-hop.Though Daedelus' first single appeared in 2001, it wasn't until the following year that his debut full-length, Invention, was released by the Plug Research label. Daedelus proved to be a prolific composer, and the following four years brought four new albums (released via Plug Research and Mush): 2003's Rethinking The Weather, 2004's Of Snowdonia, 2005's Exquisite Corpse, and 2006's Daedelus Denies The Day's Demise. He also worked on countless singles and side projects, including a stint as a producer for his Mush label-mates. "Sublime eccentric beats and sampledelic cutups from the unstoppable Daedelus, offering up his distinct plunderphonic charm for the Laboratory Instinct label. Following on from releases for Plug Research, Phthalo, Hefty, Tigerbeat 6, Mush and Eastern Developments, Daedelus has refined a style that is often imitated but seldom matched. The child-like quality of his selection defines these new pieces -- film samples, television advertisement clips and anachronistic narratives lifted from deep within his dusty wax archives nestle themselves amidst a weave of breaks and re-configured beats, a hip-hop paced antithesis to the drill n' bass techniques of old. Meanwhile is an utterly charming album that you will adore if you're into anything from Madlib through to Venetian Snares." --Boomkat

Artist:	DAEDELUS
Title:	A Gent Agent
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	LI 004CD

"Acclaimed Los Angeles producer Daedelus fires his second salvo from the Berlin-based label Laboratory Instinct in the form of a new, full-length recording. A Gent Agent makes good on the promise made by the spy-meets-I-and-I spirit of the renowned bedroom artist's recent 'Meanwhile EP'. The BBC has called his music, 'fiendishly clever and devilishly original'. Pitchfork found his sounds 'effortlessly charming.' Audiences in Japan, Europe and the United States have witnessed the man the San Francisco Examiner called 'an alt-tronic genius' working his magic live."

Artist:	V.L.A.D.
Title:	Xiringuitos Perdido
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$8.50
Catalog #:	LI 005EP

"V.L.A.D.'s music emerges from the death throes of new wave and electro-body-music... In fact, V.L.A.D.'s tunes are often based on unrestrained tempos with electro sounds typical of Human League, New Order or Fad Gadget. His metal roots regularly emerge through an undeniable obsession with nerve-racking and distorted sounds a typical feature of the most experimental drum'n'bass German productions. With this universe both schizophrenic and epileptic, V.L.A.D. has become one of the new French producers whose works are today in demand by such different people as the Paris label artefact, the Angstrom compilation or even Warp."

Artist:	ATOM TM
Title:	iMIX miniLP
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	LI 007CD

"iMix miniLP is his first solo outing under the Atom TM guise since 1996, not to mention his first album for Ryo and Miho's Berlin-based Laboratory Instinct. Presented in his inimitable and unique Atom style, Schmidt brings da funk on the rocking dance-club outing iMix miniLP. Over the course of seven sample-heavy tracks, Schmidt distills stylistic traces of his various aliases-Se�or Coconut's spicy rumbas, Flanger's mutant space jazz, and Geeez'n'Gosh's spindly click-hop-into lush slices of sexy acid funk."

Artist:	DELL & FLUGEL
Title:	Superstructure
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	LI 008CD

This is the premiere collaboration between Christopher Dell and Roman Fl�gel (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High). Brace yourself for Superstructure, an incredible poly-stylistic fusion of jazz, hip-hop, glitch, dub and techno. Flanger devotees will be drawn to the pair's like-minded genre-defying approach, with Dell's sparkling vibes a recurring focal point throughout the album's nine adventurous tracks. The wild, vibes-drums duet "Miniaturisation" suggests the playful outcome of a lost Frank Zappa-meets-Thelonious Monk session, the mysterious "Wolkenb�gel" marries clip-clopping tom-tom rhythms with Hancock-flavoured Rhodes ruminations, and "4 Door Body Cell" offers bright minimal techno bolstered by lashing handclaps and frenzied cymbal patterns. Distinguished by a rich array of soft gamelan tinklings and burnished trumpet musings, the jazz-tinged stuttering hip-hop of "Urban Practise" is equally arresting, with Dell's cascading vibes detouring into an oblique solo that would do Monk proud. Bookended by the glitchy soul-jazz and clipped syncopations of the warm opener "Superstructure" and the darker, hypnotic glitch-dub of "Dirty Realism," this remarkably assured album inhabits a unique computer-enhanced interzone of futuristic sounds.

Artist:	DELL & FLUGEL
Title:	Study For a Skyscraper EP
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$8.50
Catalog #:	LI 009EP

After their first full-length collaboration called Superstructure, Berlin-based Christopher Dell and Roman Fl�gel (Alter Ego, Eight Miles High) release Study For A Skyscraper EP, featuring two Superstructure CD cuts not included on the vinyl version. Clearly designed for the club, the bright bumping techno of "4 Door Body Cell" and the infectiously grooving title track are exquisite dance floor material. Best of all, A Guy Called Gerald (Gerald Simpson) contributes what he calls a "drop-tech infusion" of Dell & Fl�gel's entire album. This UK acid house pioneer alchemizes the album's sonic particles into a fabulous slab of driving electro-techno.

Artist:	A GUY CALLED GERALD
Title:	Proto Acid/The Berlin Sessions
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	LI 011CD

Britain's A Guy Called Gerald (Gerald Simpson) made his Laboratory Instinct debut with a "drop-tech infusion" mix of Dell & Fl�gel's "Superstructure" that appeared on the duo's Study For A Skyscraper EP. Now the acid house pioneer and drum'n'bass legend issues his own superb full-length Laboratory Instinct, appropriately-titled Proto Acid The Berlin Sessions. Having literally influenced generations of music-makers with an incredible discography that's grown incrementally deeper since the '80s, the Manchester UK native and now Berlin resident executes the infectious 71-minute jam with a masterful meticulousness. Drenching Detroit-styled techno in sparkling electro, the set, recorded live in one session using two laptops and a DJ mixer at Gerald's Diehold Studio on February 11th, 2006, flows with a relaxed ease. With one exception ("Auto Rebuild," the third track, is a remake of 1990's "Automannik"), the album's 24 raw, club-oriented tracks are all new. Asked to describe the album's sound, Simpson says, "To me it's proto acid; it's how I feel house/techno music would have sounded if the whole rave thing hadn't happened in England ... This stuff has direct lineage to Chicago and Detroit in the mid-to-late '80s." Don't think that, for Simpson, acid's definition is limited to something as obvious as the 303 either. On the disc itself, Simpson doesn't waste a moment but immediately invigorates the set with the pumping tribal groove of "Marching Powder" before moving on to the steely funk-throb of "The Strip." The mix's strutting electro strain makes its first appearance in "Auto Rebuild" and dominates thereafter, though its presence is subtly modulated from one cut to the next, at one moment oozing a house vibe and the next techno. While differences distinguish one track from the next (though Simpson avows that his influences are more machines than particular artists, a seeming Drexciya influence emerges in "Droid" and the dark synth-driven "Feel the Heat" while dub rears its head in "Xray" and "Bass-o-Train"), there's clearly a unified feel to the album. "Skitzoid" casts a mechano spell, "Night Flight" breezily rocks, and the jacking cut "Voltar" broils feverishly for almost eight minutes. Bringing the mix to a chilled close, "Sweet You" floats in a billowing haze of jazzy pianos and locomotive drum brushes before vaporizing in a cloud of cymbal accents.

Artist:	A GUY CALLED GERALD
Title:	Proto Acid: The Berlin Sessions 2
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$8.50
Catalog #:	LI 012EP

Following last year's critically-acclaimed Proto Acid album, the Berlin-based acid house innovator A Guy Called Gerald provides a taster for what to expect from the second installment. "Voltar" starts off with shuffling drums and tribal beats, evolving into haunting sounds and what could be a Native American Indian chanting are gradually introduced. An adventurous take on house music. "Sweet You" features subtle breaks and understated drums, providing the basis for dreamy Motor City chords, a plunging, resonating bassline and old school piano keys. Don't miss this opportunity to sample the latest experiments from Gerald's lab.

Artist:	NIKAKOI
Title:	Requiem For Deranged Robot
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	LI 013CD

Tbilisi, Georgia-based electronic composer Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi presents an album for Laboratory Instinct that couldn't be more different from the contorted electro, breakbeat hyper-jazz and post-modern pop of his previous releases or from his work as Erast. Stretched across two discs, sketched in brief or in tracks running from 17 and 18 minutes, Requiem For Deranged Robot is a collection of electro-acoustic compositions and ambient mood-pieces of unusual beauty and immersive power. Drawing from influences like Erik Satie, Raymond Scott, Brian Eno and Pete Namlook, Nikakoi's music is muted and slow-moving, running piano and strings through batteries of effects, until the music feels like a dub of a dub of a dub, bruised and abraded; tiny electronic tendrils flick about the peripheries. (Much of the album feels like the lost soundtrack to a classic art-house film, which makes sense: Machaidze was trained as an animator and director of feature films.) But as strangely soothing as the music is, with its aura rippling like lake water under the new moon, it's also complex stuff. Partly programmed and partly improvised, the music reflects the spontaneous nature of its creation, evolving as if by some organic process. And ironically, the music's richness belies its lo-fi origins: many sounds come straight from the on-board speakers of a cheap Yamaha synthesizer, recorded via microphone into the computer. Machaidze made particular use of the "slice" function in Fruity Loops as a means of altering structure and texture. The title comes from a documentary film that Machaidze was watching at the time of making this album; the plot concerned the deconstruction of a U.S. Navy fighter jet into constituent parts utilized in every day consumer electronics -- cell phones, CD players, microwave ovens, computers, all of them related in their electrical DNA to mammoth killing machines. The "Ghost Files" of CD2 are meant as a kind of homage to the "ghost files" left deep in the memory of the deranged, disarranged robot -- half toaster, half fighter. It should be no surprise that such a critique of consumer capitalism and the military-industrial complex might come out of a former Soviet Republic. The only surprise is how tender the final result turns out to be. Requiem For Deranged Robot is a gorgeous, mysterious, generous and all-embracing work.

Artist:	NIKAKOI
Title:	Selected
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	LI 014CD

Selected draws upon Tbilisi, Georgia-based Nikakoi's first two albums, but it's not a complete reissue. Instead, Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi has gathered nine tracks from Sestrichka, 11 from Sentimental and 10 all-new recordings. All 30 tracks have been completely re-sequenced, shuffling old with new to create a hybrid album that's far more than the sum of its parts. Over two and a quarter hours long, Selected is a treasure trove, amazingly rich and varied, of almost cinematic proportions. Appropriately for an artist who also directs and edits film and video, on Selected the forces of chance and sentiment play out in a widescreen panorama of chaos-skirting rhythms and heartstring-tugging melodies. There are ample traces of '90s electronica and IDM in Nikakoi's skittering rhythms and melancholic refrains, but it's not mere redux. Tracks like "Krasnagorsky Dream" and "PP" treat the styles established early in their careers by Aphex Twin and Autechre as a kind of folk idiom with infinite potential... rather than bound by the anxiety of influence, they're bursting with innocence and, yes, sincerity. There are moments of unbridled rhythmic and textural experimentation, like the new "HACPYBYXO," which somehow manages to sound soothing despite its punishing, quadruple-time arpeggios. Dub enters the picture on tracks like "Undine 2" and "Minimsss 3," which recall the fluid grooves and expansive sonics of artists like Pole and Burnt Friedman. Tweaked breakbeats and lounge instrumentation drive the '60s-inspired "Surup," while "Cverty 2 For May" is a slow-mo take on minimal techno at its most velvety. And finally, there are the many moments of understated electronic-pop genius: "Tin Soldier For Nika Ono," "City Lights [Tutta 2]," "Petja," "Sentimental" and "Nishan3test," all of them bittersweet and starry-eyed, teenage dreams burnished by the years to a dull shine. Nikakoi is truly a softy at heart, but his music is as complex as any human emotion: both sentimental and sedimentary, Selected is like an architectural survey for a planet where the soil itself is composed of microscopic fragments of memory.

Artist:	TBA_NATALIE BERIDZE
Title:	Pending
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	LI 015CD

2009 release. After five albums for Thomas Brinkmann's max.ernst label, Tbilisi, Georgia-based producer Natalie Tusia Beridze aka TBA comes aboard Laboratory Instinct with Pending. It's her first album since 2007's Size and Tears (MAXE 014CD), and between its tentative melodies and its astonishingly rich tones, it might be her most emotionally-focused yet. But the record's cohesive feel doesn't mean that she has tempered her ambitions. Quite the opposite: Pending runs a gamut of moods and styles, borrowing bits and pieces from ambient, hip-hop, house, techno and pop. Where so much electronic music pledges itself to a lone technology or a single beat structure, Beridze only takes what she needs from swollen synthesizer patches, jittery drum programming, sampled pianos, even the occasional breakbeat. Beridze's own voice, often stretched like gauze through an array of reverb, lends an extra layer of warmth. "To 'Hell Risers'" opens the album like a calm intake of breath, with acoustic samples pulsing beneath a purring spray of syllables. "Don't Know Why" feels like Underworld on helium, or the Postal Service wearing anti-gravity boots: it's classic electro-pop, and it soars. On "Good Night Tokyo," notes flicker like a time-lapse film of a night-time skyline, but slowly decaying chords and drifting vocals impart a sense of stillness that only deepens with the beatless "X.It (Endo)," three minutes of keys and strings. The classically-inspired sketches "Ice Turns End" and "Isole" suggest excerpts from film scores, which makes sense, given Beridze's own filmmaking work and her multimedia activities with the Goslab collective. One of the album's most powerful tracks, "Cuts vs. Ignorance" fuses Detroit techno's keening synths to stuttery, hip-hop-influenced beats. "Everything Pushes Me Further Away" is even heavier, with an unrelenting spray of metallic scraps abrading a dark, velvety backdrop. Occasionally, Beridze will come clean with relatively straightforward pop songs, but always rendered in her unusually intimate, voices-in-your-head style. At the album's center, there's "Come To Kiss Me," a nine-minute masterpiece of fluttering chords, indebted to Steve Reich and Terry Riley's pulse minimalism. It's a gorgeous, expanding mass, a slow-motion explosion of color as dizzying as its title promises.

Artist:	A GUY CALLED GERALD
Title:	Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	LI 017CD

A Guy Called Gerald has spent the last couple of years flitting through shadows, turning up on labels like Perlon, Beatstreet and Sender like a peripatetic prophet of the Berlin underground, seeding the scene with cryptic singles that return to the past to suggest alternate futures. Now he returns to Berlin's Laboratory Instinct label with the follow-up to 2006's Proto Acid: The Berlin Sessions (LI 011CD/LP). Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sessions builds upon the foundation established by its predecessor to create an even more powerful statement of intent, one that communicates more persuasively than ever Gerald's vision for techno. Where Proto Acid offered a seamless mix of 24 cuts, recorded in one epic session, Tronic Jazz collects 13 stand-alone tracks. That's welcome news to DJs. But there's something else: freed from the flow of the mix, the tracks go deeper into themselves, even while contributing to the overall shape of the album as a single, coherent form. They're more varied in tone and mood, and even tempo. While Proto Acid was, by definition, a track-y affair, a kind of puzzle comprised of interlocking pieces, Tronic Jazz stretches out to explore its ideas in greater detail and greater depth. Nothing overstays its welcome: Gerald is a master of concision, and he manages to express everything he needs in five-minute chunks -- inside which time stops still, arrested by the interplay of deftly-programmed machine rhythms, carefully arranged chord progressions, and a masterfully intuitive sense of sound design. Like Proto Acid, Tronic Jazz is an extension of a life spent listening closely to machines, knowing exactly what knob to tweak at exactly the right instant. It represents a feedback loop through the artist and his circuitry -- a spontaneous journey though the miles of silicon in his vintage boxes. You could call Tronic Jazz's sound classic: its Spartan drum machines, analog synthesizers and carefully-sculpted funk are all modeled after a blueprint laid down decades ago in Chicago and Detroit. Cutting a glissando lead through a field of drum shrapnel, like some kind of pixie earthmover, or rubbing two bass lines up against each other til they throw off sparks. This stuff is wide-eyed and full of life. When it funks, it funks hard, and when it smoothes out, it can be as intimate as a hand-written note left on a lover's pillow.

Previous Page Index of Labels Next Page

Artist:	ERAST
Title:	Goodair + Minimissing
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	LP
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	LI 003LP

Artist:	VA
Title:	Advanced Public Listening 1
Label:	LABORATORY INSTINCT (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	LIRD 1001CD